On Discourse Marker Ⅰ Suppose

The analysis of discourse markers has drawn worldwide attention from many scholars because of its frequent appearance in daily conversations. However, such lexical items as I suppose, I think and I guess, which are also very ubiquitous in our daily talk, do not have the same attraction. A few analyses on such items are mainly from the perspective of grammar and there is no agreed name about it among the scholars. Some call them hedged performatives, parenthetical verbs; others call them discourse operators, psychological verbs and so on. In this paper, qualitative study on the item I suppose is combined with quantitative analyses based on a large number of examples from the British National Corpus and from 3000 English Literature Works, from the perspective of its grammatical structure, semantic implication and pragmatic functions, indicating that I suppose is also a discourse marker with the same properties as any other markers. As a marker, it is a grammaticized form of I suppose heading a that-clause, functioning as an adverbial phrase in its syntactic structure with disposable positions. Meanwhile, its meaning has also been changed along the process of grammaticalization. Based on the Speech-Act-Theory, our study shows that in the sentence-initial and medial positions, I suppose has a similar meaning to that of its original form-the verb suppose, showing speaker's belief towards what he or she says. While at the end of the sentence, I suppose has got different meanings, which could only be interpreted according to the context, indicating speaker's uncertainty towards what he or she says. Therefore, this marker is always used as a politeness strategy with different functions in different positions.